Amazingly a man's severed finger grew back thanks to one South Florida doctor and a little pig bladder.
Jockey Paul Halpern was feeding a horse when the animal managed to bite off one of his fingers.
"One of the guys that worked with me reached his hand in the horse’s mouth, took the fingertip out, and I jumped in the car, grabbed the rest of my finger wondering what we should do,” Halpern told CBS Miami.
He took the severed fingertip to the hospital, but staff told him it was too late to re-attach it.
Halpern sought out Dr. Eugenio Rodriguez of the Deerfield Beach Outpatient Surgical Center, who he had heard used a revolutionary procedure called xenograft implantation.
Rodriguez used pig bladder tissue to create a mold of Halpern's missing finger and attached it to the stump. He then instructed Halpern to apply a powder made from the same pig bladder tissue for two months.
Watch the video above for more details on the procedure.
Pig bladder is used because its “protein scaffold” is “nearly identical to that of human tissue,” according to Medical Daily.
"It stimulates your body to attract your stem cells and then the stem cells start producing the tissue that is missing,” Rodriguez told NBC6.
Weeks later, the finger’s cells, bone, soft tissue, and nail grew into the mold, reports CBS Miami.
"Long story short, it grew back – the majority of it," Halpern told NBC6. "I'm quite happy."
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